Lita Albuquerque’s Stellar Axis installation is the first large-scale artwork created in Antarctica. This milestone of contemporary land art, widely acknowledged to be both a stunning and ecologically sensitive intervention on the continent, has received international acclaim. Originally funded by the National Science Foundation, Albuquerque’s Stellar Axis was installed on the Ross Ice Shelf on December 22, 2006—concurrent with the summer Solstice in the Southern Hemisphere. This exhibition features original objects and archive materials from the 2006 project. In conjunction with the exhibition, SKIRA Rizzoli, New York will publish the first major publication on Lita Albuquerque.

Andrea Zittel’s Wallsprawl #4 (Las Vegas, Next to Nellis Air Force Base), is based on an aerial photograph of the southern Nevada military installation known as Nellis Air Force Base. Zittel sourced the image online from an aerial image database (before Google Maps made such imagery easily accessible).

The original image—before Zittel repeated and replicated it—shows a large-scale military campus intersecting with the wide-open desert landscape, exposing the infrastructure of a site that is presumably off-limits to the general public.

By converting an image of an American military base into custom-designed wallpaper, Zittel metaphorically transforms a highly-charged landscape into pure aesthetic decoration and encourages a different way of viewing and thinking about the world.

Collection of the Nevada Museum of Art, 

Museum purchase with funds provided by the Contemporary Art Acquisition Fund

Maya Lin is inevitably cast as an architectonic artist, but over the past decade she has engaged the vocabulary of a cartographer, making artworks that help viewers to visualize complex natural and cultural systems operating in the world. This exhibition unites sculptural objects alongside what Lin considers to be her final memorial project, What is Missing? An interactive mapping website, What is Missing? relies upon triaxial dimensions of space, as well as those of time—past, present, and future—to engage us with species and habitats that have disappeared or may soon vanish. Utilizing both memory and projection, objective numbers and subjective narrative, What is Missing? asks us to reconsider our relationship to nature at time when it is critical to do so.

Paruku is the region in Australia’s Western Desert that surrounds the inland body of water known to settlers as Lake Gregory. Named after the English-born explorer Sir August Gregory, this terminal desert lake has long been a resource for the Walmajarri-speaking Aboriginal people. The ancient shoreline of Lake Gregory contains what may be the oldest sites of continuous human cultural production in the world, with artifacts excavated there estimated to be as old as 50,000 years.

The local Aboriginal people—approximately 150 men and women who are referred to as the “Traditional Owners” of Paruku—live in the nearby settlement of Mulan. The unique cultural and environmental values of Paruku led the Australian government to declare it an Indigenous Protected Area, or IPA, in 2001.

The Paruku Project was a two-year effort consisting of teams of scientists, artists, and writers working in this Aboriginal desert community, one of the poorest and most remote in Australia. The first task of the teams was to assess current conditions. They found an environment severely stressed by invasive species and a culture slowly losing its identity. The second task was to design and implement cross-cultural and transformational responses to these conditions, many of which involved artmaking.

Australian artist Mandy Martin and conservationist Guy Fitzhardinge, along with writer and artist Kim Mahood, worked with Walmajari people to revitalize the art center in Mulan, which in turn helped attract attention and funding from policy makers to address challenges facing the region.

Support

The John Ben Snow Memorial Trust

The Williston Basin is a 300,000-square-mile depression that includes parts of North and South Dakota, Montana, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan. Two miles beneath the surface of the basin lies a shale deposit called the Bakken Formation, where hydraulic fracturing has unlocked vast amounts of petroleum. Fracturing, also known as “fracking,” pumps water, sand, and chemicals underground at high pressure to crack buried strata and force oil and gas to wells. The process is controversial because the long-term effects of the process on groundwater, ground stability, and other environmental conditions are unknown.

Photographer Terry Evans and journalist/writer Elizabeth Farnsworth took cameras, geology books, laptops, and notebooks to North Dakota for 18 months to explore the effects of the oil boom on prairie and people. The project generated aerial and ground-based photographs, and extensive interviews with people on all sides of the boom. From those rejoicing in new wealth to those mourning the lost prairie, the work by Evans and Farnsworth reveals the complicated environmental, economic, and social consequences brought about by the boom.

Support

The John Ben Snow Memorial Trust

In 2012, Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley, two of the Internet’s most critically acclaimed bloggers, embarked on a multi-state tour of the United States “to document often overlooked yet fascinating sites through the eyes of the innovators, trendsetters, entrepreneurs, and designers at the forefront of ideas today.” Their 16 month long journey, inspired by nineteenth-century survey expeditions, was known as VENUE. Manaugh and Twilley took along a variety of analog and digital instruments and a custom, hand-built toolbox containing recording equipment that they used as a pop-up studio—a temporary “venue”—to record audio and video.

Manaugh and Twilley visited sites as diverse as New Mexico’s radio astronomy observatory known as the Very Large Array, to the world’s largest living organism in the Blue Mountains of Oregon, to the stilt houses of Florida’s Biscayne Bay. They interviewed experts ranging from a speleo-biologist, a golf-course designer, the keeper of the U.S. national atomic clock, and a car crash reconstructionist, to environmental lawyers, concept artists, archivists, and photographers. Throughout their travels they posted reports of their exploits, assembling a completely new cross-section of the country for the 21st century.

Sponsor

Western States Arts Federation

Doris Duke’s Shangri La: Architecture, Landscape, and Islamic Art will be the first comprehensive traveling exhibition of objects from Duke’s remarkable Hawaiian home, Shangri La. Situated amidst five acres of interlocking terraced gardens and pools overlooking the Pacific Ocean and Honolulu’s Diamond Head, Shangri La powerfully reflects Duke’s life-long aesthetic passions. This exhibition brings together furnishings and objects, contemporary works by eight of Shangri La’s artists in residence, vintage photographs and films, documentation of the estate’s construction, architectural drawings, and ephemera exploring the history and experience of this remarkable place. A 216-page catalogue published by Skira Rizzoli accompanies the exhibition.

Lead Sponsor

Nancy and Martin Cohen

Major Sponsor

Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art

Supporting Sponsor

Bally Technologies

Sponsors

Jeanne and Alan Blach, Denise and Tim Cashman, and Enid A. Oliver, Ameriprise Financial Services, Inc.

Additional Sponsor

Northern Nevada International Center

This exhibition was organized by the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art.

Picturing Mexico: Alfredo Ramos Martínez marks the first comprehensive examination of the artist’s work produced from 1929 to 1946. An artist of great significance, Ramos Martínez (1871–1946) developed his own distinctive contribution to modernism. This exhibition explores Ramos Martínez’s work through four sections—Many Women, Religious Piety, Los Angeles Stories, and Forever Mexico—and how he produced an individual response to Mexico from Los Angeles.

The study of Ramos Martínez’s work in Los Angeles provides a greater understanding of the myriad cultural contributions of artists living in the city during the first half of the twentieth century. While many scholars have studied the influence of Rivera, Orozco, and Siqueiros in the United States, this exhibition breaks new ground by further developing research on the presence of other influential Mexican artists in Los Angeles. This exhibition also offers visitors an opportunity to understand the constant cultural exchange between the United States and Mexico in new ways.

Nolan Preece, a photographer for over forty years, has devoted his work to understanding and mastering the challenging techniques of early photography and conceiving of new photo-based processes at the same time. In the late 1970s and early 80s, his fondness for experimental photography led him to originate a photographic abstraction process that employed chemical masking techniques and staining in conjunction with a printed image.

Preece called his resulting prints “chemograms,” but after recently engaging with a group of artists using similar processes—most notably Pierre Cordier of Brussels, Belgium—Preece has taken to using the term “chemigram” to describe his prints. This exhibition features Preece’s chemigrams produced over the past three decades.

Preece served as galleries curator and art professor at Truckee Meadows Community College for eleven years before retiring in 2010. He is also known for his landscape portfolios of the United States and the West, as well as his Great Basin wall series that are now documents of a changing environment. Preece’s photographs are in the collections of the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Logan, Utah; the Utah Museum of Fine Art, Salt Lake City; the Nevada Museum of Art; and most recently, the Southern Graphics Council Archives in Mississippi.

Reno-born artist Davey Hawkins lives and works in New York, and has taken a special interest in the physical evidence of human industrial interventions with the natural world. Through his installation made with materials derived from chemical by-products, Hawkins’ work demonstrates both an acceptance of environmental degradation in the 21st century, and a desire to transform physical detritus into visual poetry.

Hawkins is a candidate in the Master of Fine Arts graduate program at Columbia University in New York, and expects his MFA in 2014. This exhibition is part of the Nevada Museum of Art’s Emerging Artist Series.